Quotes about the world
page 10
Saying 33, Page 8
From Apophthegmata Patrum
As quoted in Louis Pasteur, Free Lance of Science (1960) by René Jules Dubos, Ch. 3 : Pasteur in Action
On how his upbringing informs his comedy in “Life’s Work: An Interview with Trevor Noah” https://hbr.org/2018/09/lifes-work-an-interview-with-trevor-noah in Harvard Business Review (September-October, 2018)
Personal life
“Have I done the world good, or have I added a menace?”
Marconi, 1934: cited in Raboy, Marc (2016) The Man Who Networked the World, p. 631 https://books.google.com/books?id=qn59DAAAQBAJ&pg=PA631&lpg=PA631#v=onepage&q&f=false|Marconi:
Overcoming a Personal Holocaust, Alfred Freddy Krupa (in the article by Ante Vranković), Life As A Human (Canada), 2019
2010s
This is a variant or paraphrase of The Paradoxical Commandments, by Kent M. Keith, student activist, first composed in 1968 as part of a booklet for student leaders, which had hung on the wall of Mother Teresa's children's home in Calcutta, India, and have sometimes become misattributed to her. The version posted at his site http://www.paradoxicalcommandments.com begins:
Misattributed
“There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter.”
No other substance but this could produce the human molecule. I know very well that this idea of spirit-matter is regarded as a hybrid monster, a verbal exorcism of a duality which remains unresolved in its terms. But I remain convinced that the objections made to it arise from the mere fact that few people can make up their minds to abandon an old point of view and take the risk of a new idea. … Biologists or philosophers cannot conceive a biosphere or noosphere because they are unwilling to abandon a certain narrow conception of individuality. Nevertheless, the step must be taken. For in fact, pure spirituality is as unconceivable as pure materiality. Just as, in a sense, there is no geometrical point, but as many structurally different points as there are methods of deriving them from different figures, so every spirit derives its reality and nature from a particular type of universal synthesis.
A Sketch of a Personalistic Universe (1936)
The Reappearance of the Christ and the Masters of Wisdom (1980)
My Twisted World (2014), 19-22, UC Santa Barbara, Building to Violence
in The Alchemist of Happiness
A Collection of Essays, pp. 65-66
Charles Dickens (1939)
He liked to think of the lost people, the under-ground people: tramps, beggars, criminals, prostitutes. It is a good world that they inhabit, down there in their frowzy kips and spikes. He liked to think that beneath the world of money there is that great sluttish underworld where failure and success have no meaning; a sort of kingdom of ghosts where all are equal. That was where he wished to be, down in the ghost-kingdom, below ambition. It comforted him somehow to think of the smoke-dim slums of South London sprawling on and on, a huge graceless wilderness where you could lose yourself forever.
Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 10
Source: The Outermost House, 1928, p. 25: Ch 2
Reported in, C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. (1917).
There are many other options of organization for the future than those typically discussed today... In order to accomplish this task one must be free of bias and nationalism, and reflect those qualities in the design of policies. How would you approach that? This is a difficult project requiring input from many disciplines.
Source: Designing the Future (2007), p. 6-7
"Joaquin Phoenix's Oscars speech in full: 'We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby'" https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/feb/10/joaquin-phoenixs-oscars-speech-in-full, The Guardian (February 10, 2020).
"The Power of One", TIME Magazine (26 August 2002) http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1003125,00.html
via Twitter https://twitter.com/johannes_mono/status/1250039288517050369
Source: Movie The Two Popes, Jonathan Pryce as Pope Francis
“Be different than the world, otherwise, there are lots of stars in the sky.”
2020
“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.”
Source: Posted on instagram @angelovulpini, September 2nd, 2021. https://www.instagram.com/p/CTVVtsfrRvh/
Source: https://quotepark.com/suggestions/create-quote/author/?originator_name=Angelo%20Vulpini
Drugs and Governments
Focus Fourteen
2011, Remarks by the President to Parliament in London, United Kingdom (May 2011)
“Perhaps the greatest sin in the world today is that men have begun to lose the sense of sin.”
Radio Message of His Holiness Pius XII to Participants in the National Catechetical Congress of the United States in Boston https://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/speeches/1946/documents/hf_p-xii_spe_19461026_congresso-catechistico-naz.html, from Castel Gandolfo on Saturday, 26 October 1946
Source: Letter to Isaac Disraeli (c. 8 September 1826), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume. I. 1804–1859 (1929), p. 108
Source: Diary entry while in Aix (c. 16 August 1824), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume I. 1804–1859 (1929), pp. 52-53
“The women who changed the world never needed to show anything other than their own intelligence.”
Source: Cited in Addio a Rita Levi Montalcini, scienziata e donna straordinaria http://www.panorama.it/scienza/rita-levi-montalcini-morta/, Panorama.it, 30 dicembre 2012.
“Sorry I didn't save the world, my friend
I was too busy buildin' mine again
I choose me, I'm sorry”
Mirror
Song lyrics, Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers (2022)
Context: PIPPIN: I didn't think it would end this way.
GANDALF: End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.
PIPPIN: What? Gandalf? See what?
GANDALF: White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.
PIPPIN: Well, that isn't so bad.
GANDALF: No. No, it isn't.
"Chapter X," Babe Ruth's Own Book of Baseball (1928), p. 135; reprinted as "Babe Ruth's Own Story — Chapter X: Great Individual Stars Worth Little Without Team Play; Signs and How They Operate, https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=c0sbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=AUsEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4554%2C1154246 The Pittsburgh Press (January 18, 1929), p. 45
Context: Baseball always has been and always will be a game demanding team play. You can have the nine greatest individual ball players in the world, but if they don't play together the club won't be worth a dime.
A comment he made in persuading John Sculley to become Apple's CEO, as quoted in Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple: A Journey of Adventure, Ideas, and the Future (1987) by John Sculley and John A. Byrne
1980s
Source: Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 9 Vols.
Said about Absinthe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absinthe. Quoted in “Letters to the Sphinx from Oscar Wilde: With Reminiscences of the Author" by Ada Leverson (London: Duckworth, 1930)
“Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.”
“Deceiving others. That is what the world calls a romance.”
“The aspiration to save the world is a morbid phenomenon of today's youth.”
Variant: For whatever we lose (like a you or a me),
It's always our self we find in the sea.
Source: 100 Selected Poems
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl
“… I'm looking for the face I had, before the world was made…”
“We may not be able to stop evil in the world, but how we treat one another is entirely up to us.”
2011, Tucson Memorial Address (January 2011)
Context: We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us. I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.
Context: I believe we can be better. Those who died here, those who saved lives here — they help me believe. We may not be able to stop all evil in the world, but I know that how we treat one another is entirely up to us. I believe that for all our imperfections, we are full of decency and goodness, and that the forces that divide us are not as strong as those that unite us.
“Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll transform the whole world.”
Source: Animals Matter: A Biologist Explains Why We Should Treat Animals with Compassion and Respect
The microcosm.
5.63
Original German: Ich bin meine welt (Der Mikrokosmos.)
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916
Variant: Man is the microcosm:
I am my world.
Source: Requiem for a Dream
Source: Pillow Talk in Europe and Other Places
“Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?”
Source: 1910s, The Problems of Philosophy (1912)
Chapter 117 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo/Chapter_117
Source: The Count of Monte Cristo (1845–1846)
Context: Tell the angel who will watch over your future destiny, Morrel, to pray sometimes for a man who, like Satan, thought himself, for an instant, equal to God; but who now acknowledges, with Christian humility, that God alone possesses supreme power and infinite wisdom... There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life.
“The trouble with this world is that everybody has to compromise and conform.”
“Where your talents and the needs of the world cross; there lies your vocation.”
“She lives in a world of her own – a world of – little glass ornaments…”
Source: The Glass Menagerie
The Ballot or the Bullet (1964), Speech in Cleveland, Ohio (April 3, 1964)
Context: When you expand the civil-rights struggle to the level of human rights, you can then take the case of the black man in this country before the nations in the UN. You can take it before the General Assembly. You can take Uncle Sam before a world court. But the only level you can do it on is the level of human rights. Civil rights keeps you under his restrictions, under his jurisdiction. Civil rights keeps you in his pocket. Civil rights means you’re asking Uncle Sam to treat you right. Human rights are something you were born with. Human rights are your God-given rights. Human rights are the rights that are recognized by all nations of this earth. And any time any one violates your human rights, you can take them to the world court.
July 1890, page 320
John of the Mountains, 1938
Source: John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir
General Orders, Headquarters, New York (2 July 1776)
1770s